Hoover Freedom 2in1 Cordless Stick Vacuum Cleaner, FD22L, Handheld, Above Floor Cleaning, Lightweight - Blue

Product Information

An affordable cordless cleaner, but difficult to handle and delivers poor cleaning results across the board. A 2-in-1 dusting brush and upholstery tool is perfect for cleaning delicate fabrics, and a crevice tool helps you clean difficult to reach areas.

A soft and good-sized dusting brush that clips to this, and looks suitable for battling high-rise cobwebs.Smart charging also means that you can leave it on charge permanently to ensure it’s always ready for cleaning duties.

If you have the wrist strength and energy to manoeuvre the Hoover Freedom, it’s actually quite handy for stairs. Richard has more than 20 years experience as a technology journalist, writing and editing on a vast number of publications. The day was saved to an extent by the crevice tool and a good dual-purpose upholstery and cleaning brush. This lightweight handheld combines extension tube and power brush-head for floors, and some neat tools for up-close detail cleaning.One assumes that after a few months of stuffing the charging cable into the wrong hole and nothing happening, you’ll get used to that. In either hand, the one thing we can guarantee after 20+ minutes of cleaning is wrist-ache and a few areas of soreness where plastic has been digging into your hand. From a completely flat battery, it turned blue to indicate it was fully charged some five-and-a-half hours to six later.

Hoover is the latest brand to join the pistol-grip cordless vacuum cleaner revolution with the affordable Freedom FD22G. Its 20-minute battery life will struggle to clean any home bigger than a small apartment, while it’s lack of attachments, and raw suction power, also make it unsuitable. However, we’d suggest that this cordless device is designed to be used as a supplementary vacuum cleaner. Both are a decent size, and with the airflow condensed into a smaller area, both provide reasonable suction.With no dedicated hard-floor head you’ll need to use the standard floor-head, even though the brush can’t be switched off. Suction appears to be a little better than the SlimVac, but when spread across the larger floor-head it’s still rather asthmatic. Perhaps the most disappointing of all is the lack of a wall-mounted charging bracket – a feature that encapsulates the convenience of cordless vacuum cleaners.

However, there’s certainly a little more suction power on offer than the Vax – and a more efficient floor-head – so we’re happy to lose that 4 minutes.It’s a lithium battery pack, so putting it on charge even if it’s only half depleted won’t affect the long-term performance of the battery. The main cleaner is almost identical to the woeful Vax SlimVac we tested in December, so the Freedom suffers similar issues with handling, pet hairs and low-quality build. Unfortunately, the combination of limited cleaning ability and our coarse stair carpet with embedded pet hair was a challenge too far for the Freedom, and its struggled to clean efficiently.